Aimless, Attention and Distinction Starved Sannyasi

A Critical Letter and My Response

Bhaktivedanta Manor, England - Tuesday, May 28, 2002: Hare Krishna. Tomorrow I'm getting ready to fly to America (yet again), and I'll be gone from Jolly Ol' England until the 3rd of September, 2002.

I received a letter from someone who just does not like my style in Krishna Consciousness. I will quote the majority of his letter (leaving out certain parts only because it was difficult to format in this article). I have left out the name of the author of the letter, but he uses an uninitated name in his signature.

He wrote to me recently as follows. His letter and my responses to him are both in Italics. My comments not sent to him but intended for this article only are in plain text, without italics.

Dear Vipramukhya Swami, Once again I find myself writing to you out of both concern and disappointment. Before, you reacted in a very defensive way, brushing aside the issue with clichés and an overall laissez faire attitude. This time I hope that you will take the matter more seriously and respond with introspection.

I think I vaguely remember he wrote me a year or two ago with a similar letter. I must have responded the way he describes. That's probably a fair description of the mood I took at the time. So this time around I decided to pay more attention and at least read his entire letter. I had to remove a small portion of his letter below because he was quoting a recent Pilgrim's Diary article, and the formatting of the quoted text was difficult to get right. I also occasionally intersperse his letter with comments of my own for the purpose of this article, and then follow it with my emailed response to his letter at the end of this article.

The author of the letter continued:

The issue, of course, remains the way you represent your ashram. Five years ago I detected many disturbing elements in your writings and Internet activities that, to me, indicated that you are not at all properly situated in your ashram. Over the last five years I have seen no significant positive changes take place.

My my. He really seems concerned. Perhaps he has more of a problem with me than I do. So I read on:

There are certain qualities expected from someone in the renounced order of life. Besides the obvious characteristics of truthfulness, cleanliness, et cetera, we also expect graveness, seriousness, and soberness. Ideally, we expect to see someone with fully controlled senses. If not, then at least an exhibition of utmost endeavor to attain that stage. We expect frugalness and maturity, humility and efficiency. In your case, Sadly, after all these years we still see excessive frolic, childishness, misuse of time and laksmi, and a rather prominent desire for adoration and distinction. I acknowledge that these are indeed problems many of us struggle with in our daily lives, but that is exactly why many of us are not in the sannyasa ashram. You are, and you have chosen so. This very fact alone ought to make you much more attentive to the way you carry yourself.

At your personal website (www.chantandbehappy.com) the casual visitor may be impressed with its content, which is obviously meant to spread your glories. However, knowing that, due to its glorifying nature, creating and maintaining such a website is usually a task for disciples, one may wonder what induced you to take up this not-so-humble task upon yourself. And considering the technical know-how and equipment required, and the creation and manipulation of data and images, what an involving and time consuming task that must be. For one who's service it is to preach to the world through the electronic medium, the worldwide web is a unique and powerful opportunity that should not be missed. For everyone else it is a web indeed.

On your website we find a "doctored" picture of yourself flying on a broom stick in front of a painting of the rasa dance, which is just one among many strange pictures that you have put up on your website over the years. What purpose justifies the time spent on the creation of such pictures and their ridicule of the sannyasa ashram? And need you really inform the world about the Atkins diet and the books of Dr. Atkins? After all, the diet is almost purely meat based and his books are full of encouragement for eating meat. How do you believe to underline the graveness of the sannyasa ashram by using an online shopping cart system linked to a PayPal account for accepting donations, a live webcam, and a travel diary full of mundane topics? I am asking you.

Your Pilgrim's Diary, which is clearly an imitation of Indradyumna Swami's Diary of a Traveling Preacher, shows where your mind is at most of the time -- and that isn't with spirituality. Whereas Indradyumna Swami's diary is full of spiritual realization, preaching efforts, and non-stop programs meant to spread the mission of the Lord, your diary is filled with talk about electronic gadgets and vacation experiences. I never find any substantial spiritual content.

For example, the recent entry of Wednesday, May 8, 2002. You tell your audience how bored you are with flying and watching the same old boring movies on airplanes. You tell them all kinds of technical details about your latest expensive laptop computer, and a longwinded story about your lost and found Palm handheld computer. After these mundane topics, you tell them that you are happy that you are not paying for any of your overseas travels yourself.

To me, this is the picture of an aimless, yet attention and distinction starved character. The sannyasa ashram is not meant for traveling the globe on other people's expenses, so you can aimlessly "hang out with the guys" while creating silly images on your computer and blissfully being clueless as to why you are where you are. This is a ridiculous waste of time and resources that could be used to the advantage of Krishna consciousness. The sannyasa ashram is meant for the cultivation of material renunciation and spiritual attachment, not for glorifying one's own character to the whole world and wasting time and money. You make the sannyasa ashram look like an entry ticket to Disney World.

Swami, I do respect the fact that you have been a devotee in ISKCON for so many years and have tried to remain true to your ashram, but it goes beyond living celibate. I strongly encourage you to find ways to purify your needs for enjoyment, adoration and distinction other than what you have tried thus far. I consider this matter important enough to call it to the attention of other senior devotees within the ISKCON movement. Not to create politics, but to create awareness of what I perceive as a slowly escalating problem of egotism on your part. Perhaps your senior god brothers can help you identify and solve some of these issues.

I was probably too defensive in my reply, something he complains about in an earlier response to him some years ago. Anyway, I wrote:

Dear [Uninitiated Devotee name Withheld]

Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.

Well, sadly or happily, depending on how you look at it, I clearly don't share your world view on how you feel a sannyasi should behave. I see nowhere in the scriptures where it says a sannyasi has to be tight lipped all the time. Obviously, to remain as a sannyasi for the last 20 years, there must be some seriousness in me somewhere, and those who take the time to know me and associate with me would probably tell you that I am quite a serious devotee. I've missed my rounds in the last 30 years less than 10 times (and always made them up), I never once missed the puja for my deities, I regularly study and give classes (and those classes are available for listening online), etc.

However, I do have a sense of humor at times, and I believe strongly that this is a good quality. I certainly don't believe I have to change my outward behavior to please your perception of what you think a sannyasi should be. For me, having a good nature is preaching. Chant and be happy.

You say there are certain qualities expected form someone in the renounced order of life. I wonder who those persons are that have those expectations? I don't care to live my life according to others' expectations. I don't agree at all, of course, that I engage in excessive frolic (I don't play mundane sports, or anything of the sort), that I am childish (I ran Bhaktivedanta Manor responsibly for four years, with a million and a half pounds cash flow per year), that I misuse time or money (I have a very strict personal budget on file with the GBC body). Perhaps I have a desire for adoration and distinction, but I don't think so.

You say chantandbehappy.com is meant to spread my glories. I respect you for your opinion. I don't share your opinion.

Perhaps I should have elaborated on that paragraph more. As an author of a book has information about himself on the book jacket, so what's wrong with the author of a web site putting some information about himself on that website?

But I go beyond that, and I do it for a specific reason. Like or not, I have disciples who live far away from me. I maintain a Pilgrim's Diary in order to keep some contact with them and let them know what's happening from me, because I can't necessarily always individually write all of them all the time. Pilgrim's Diary is hosted at http://www.ChantAndBeHappy.com/diary

So I answered by saying:

As for your opinion that the Pilgrim's Diary is an imitation of Indradyumna Swami's, thank you for that opinion. Of course, I suppose it makes no difference that my Pilgrim's Diary started long before Indradyumna Swami started his diary, and it was being published on Chakra long before his was, and Chakra is now publishing his diary because I encouraged Indradyumna Swami to send his diary to Chakra. But I suppose you wouldn't be interested in that bit of history.

Actually, after I wrote and sent that, I thought perhaps that wasn't entirely true. Certainly it is true that I started writing Pilgrim's Diary when I was on the beach in Jagannath Puri, India, before sunrise, in February 2001. I felt I wanted to write my realizations down and as an after thought, share those realizations with my disciples. At that time, I had never heard of Indradyumna Swami's diary, but I think now he may have been writing one. I didn't know about it, though.

After I published my first few Pilgrim's Diary stories, I put a letter on the Trindandi Sannyasa conference on PAMHO.NET suggesting other sannyasis could also contribute articles like that to Chakra.

The basic idea here was not to appear self-serving as much as to appear transparent. I figured if people knew more about the life of a sannyasi they would see the personal side of the sannyasis. They are persons, usually advanced devotees except for maybe myself, struggling in various ways with material and spiritual situations, both practical and mundane and spiritual and inspired.

Around that time, Mother Madhusudani Radha, I now recall, was contacted by disciples of Indradyumna Swami, suggesting we could also publish his diary on Chakra.org. We agreed, and then we started publishing Indradyumna Swami's diary. But my diary was being published on Chakra before his, and before I knew of it's existence. I also wish other sannyasis would contribute articles in a similar way. So it's not fair to say that my diary is an imitation of his, but it would be fair for me to say that Indradyumna Swami is the more sincere and hard working of the two of us, and his writing is probably a lot more spiritual and inspired than my sometimes admittedly aimless writings here (kept in the interest of transparency).

Anyway, my response to the letter continued:

As for the badly written piece recently published, which you so rightly quoted, it does indeed need a correction. Especially the part when I wrote that I shouldn't pay for the ride to NV. What I should have said, of course, was that I wasn't supposed to pay for the ride because it was prepaid for me. Anyway, you wrote:

"To me, this is the picture of an aimless, yet attention and distinction starved character."

Well, I suppose I'm not really looking for a judge to decide whether I'm an aimless yet attention and distinction starved character. Personally I feel I have a purpose to my life, though I admit right now I'm depending on Krishna to show me the way since my departure as TP of Bhaktivedanta Manor. Whether I am attention and distinction starved, I kind of doubt that, because I get entirely too much attention and distinction to my liking, and I tend to withdraw when that happens. I don't actually like a lot of attention. Perhaps someone who knows me better might like to write about that.

So I wrote in reply:

Well you got that right. To you. Anyway. If you're unhappy with me, and with my response to your email, you, fortunately, have another way to deal with wayward sannyasis like me. You can write a letter of complaint to the ISKCON Sannyasa Minister. I've taken the liberty of sending him a copy of this email message just to get you started.

Otherwise, I'm happy the way I am. Why should I change? Obviously if I can manage Bhaktivedanta Manor for a few years, I must have something there.

Your servant,

Vipramukhya Swami

So that's how I replied to the letter. I was probably way to defensive and dismissive. But to me, it's his problem, not mine. He has a problem with me being the way I am. I don't. And I don't get a lot of letters like his. If I got a constant flow of critical letters like his I might give it more attention. But I don't.

So you decide. I've already decided, and that's the reason I am the way I am. I certainly don't suffer from a lack of self-confidence, and doubt myself as soon as I get a letter like that. Perhaps I should, but I don't.